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Archive for the 'General' Category
25
Dec
08
This Blog has moved
21
Jun
08
TEABREAK V- 2.0 (BETA)
The Teabreak team is proud to announce the launch of the much anticipated TEABREAK v2.0 (BETA) today. Our team members worked day in day out to give you this fresh new look and with much more exciting features.
Some of the Features that we are experimenting in this release are:
Major Face uplift and design overhaul
We completely revamped the TeaBreak design and have taken care of issues like “Too Many Advertisements”, “Ugly colors”, etc. We are hoping you guys will love the new look!! Let us know…New Columns added!
We have added 3 new columns that we will be hand-picking and updating frequently.
Featured Post, Featured Blog and Featured Blogger.Hot Posts
Here we present you a list of most viewed articles on the TeaBreak network.Categories
We have introduced categories in this release, it uses TeaBreak’s auto-categorization engine. This feature is experimental.Blogs In Pictures
We are presenting you a brand new concept and feature in the new TeaBreak website. We pick images at random and relate them to posts on our network. This feature is also experimental.
Visit now:
http://TeaBreak.pk
Our initial aim was to create new blog horizons for Pakistani bloggers and we are proud to declare that we are following the same path. As every teabreak.pk blogger is the part of the Teabreak team so we will be needing your feedback on every move we make. Simply send us your views, comments, ideas & suggestions at network@teabreak.pk.
31
May
08
Latest Post on ronin 2.0
Latest Post on ronin 2.0
08
May
08
Latest on Ronin 2.0
19
Apr
08
new posts on ronin 2.0
Here are some exciting new posts you can catch on ronin 2.0
A man can fight anything but his luck. This phrase hold true for many and one of them is our friend Kashmir Singh. For those who haven’t heard the name before; this Indian national spend thirty five years of his life in a Pakistani prison behind the bars….
the rest of the article on=========> ronin 2.0
01
Mar
08
Ronin V-2.0
Hello and Assalam alequm, this is your host and dost (pal) aMmAr. I was anticipating this moment so that I can reveal to you the big surprise I mentioned in my previous post. I give you;
I started blogging in my high school when blogging as a medium was not even there. Very few people owned their public domains, but I and another friend of mine started this high school journal and I named it “Shit Talkies”. Years after Shit Talkies I was introduced to wordpress and found you guys. The most special thing about ronin is you people, the readers of ronin.
Bloggers and readers from India, Iran, UK, USA and my motherland Pakistan come on this forum and express their point of views and we were able to form an unsigned bond which will keep us together for years to come, inshallah 🙂
Another achievement of Ronin was to shorten the gap between Indian and Pakistani bloggers. I want to thank Prerna, Aridhi Jain, Ankur Agarwal, Priyank, Amrita and others that have also through their blogs and words strengthen the message of peace. We Pakistanis are a very peace loving and hard working nation and I can say similar words for the Indians as well. I hope all the problems between the two countries can be resolved once and for all.
Last year was full of tragedies for Pakistan, the number of issues/problems my country is facing today are uncountable. But the youth of Pakistan through their blogs and words told the world that we are anything but terrorists. We are an educated and politically aware Pakistani youth that can differentiate between the right and wrong. God Bless Pakistan!
But unlike other countries Pakistani bloggers are facing an announce ban from PTA (Pakistan telecommunication Authority). Blogspot is banned again and there is a possibility that wordpress might go off net any day. So I had no choice but to go solo on my own domain.
The second reason was totally commercial, blogging has become the next best thing and will grow more. Plus with your own blog you can expand in terms of new, exciting and cool themes, plugins and widgets; that wordpress has to offer. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Asim my budd 😉 for talking sense into me 😛 and providing me with all the help I needed to make this possible. Thanx a lot man! I couldn’t have done this without ya.
I hope you will visit and enjoy ronin 2.0 as much as the first version. I had little or no time to put new posts. But I will try updating my blog more frequently inshallah. I would like to thank all of my regular readers 😉 and would be glad if you spread the word of this new blog.
28
Feb
08
Breaking News !!
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
14
Feb
08
All you need is love
Love was so in the air yesterday. People celebrated the death of Saint Valentine without feeling sorry for the poor guy. He died alone. How tragic 😛 Personally speaking, I have reached a point in my life where gimmicks related to occasion of such nature hardly effect me. I am not sure if it’s normal for a 22 year old. But I can recall the days from my High school and school when it was quite fun to do stooopid little things. When even Shahrukh Khan films made sense 😛 Yeh rite!
But rules have changed. Nice is out, naughty is in! Seriously I didn’t come up with the nice and naughty phrase. I read it on some cheap reading material. But it makes sense. Girls fall for ‘bad guys’. And guys are mostly desperate so they will ‘do’ anything or anyone, which moves. But then they don’t have a choice or do they? Chacha Murphy said something very interesting in this regard, i.e.
“All the good ones are taken. If the person isn’t taken, there’s a reason.”
Do they have a Murphy law for everything? 😛 you go and figure that out, while I will listen to my favorite number by the Beatles;
You can also watch this funny video if you want;
30
Jan
08
Follow Me, Follow You
Tens of thousands of Hong Kong people have signed up for a service that enables them to monitor the movements of their husbands or wives by mobile phone, a news report said Monday. The 3.5 US dollar a month service called “Follow Me, Follow You” offers subscribers unlimited spot searches to track a person’s location by identifying the location
of their mobile phone signal.
It can only be used to track people if both parties consent to the searches being carried out on them in the densely populated city of6.9 million, however, the South China Morning Post reported.
Tens of thousands of people have signed up for the service since its launch in 2005, the newspaper said, and the subscribers were not all suspicious wives and husbands according to the company behind it.”Most subscribers are parents who use the function to search for their kids,” a Hutchison Telecom spokesman said. “Others use it to locate elderly parents who may have lost their way home.”
Other subscribers included people who wanted to locate their maids and, of course, people who want to keep track of spouses, thespokesman told the newspaper.
Source: dpa news
24
Jan
08
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents,
who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.
And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. Thereis no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now. This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
I was tagged by my blogger friend Leila some time back. And according to the rules of this tag; I am suppose to share some 7 perfectly normal attributes about my personality that might be unusual or weird for few. They are:
1) I hate rain. Yes the one that many of you out their find romantic for unknown reasons 😛 I despise the rainy season for many good causes. It gets all muddy, we Karachiites face power failures for hours, traffic jams, you get stuck where ever you are and can’t move freely when you want. And the biggest reason of all is; rain is quite unlucky for me 😛
2) I like to watch slow, boring, reality based drama films. Yes the independent films those big studios reject for commercial value, I love to watch them especially if they are in foreign languages and with subtitles.
3) I have a whole 20 minute tooth brushing session every morning. I watch early morning news on the tele, checkout the world from my terrace, choose the outfit I am going to wear, check my inbox out while brushing teeth.
4) I use to change my hair styles after every two or three weeks. I had a pony tail once, one morning I decided to go bald, had almost every variety of hair-do’s and goatees. This thing is quite under control now since I have entered my professional life 😛
5) I am in love with water, ocean, sea, swimming pool 😛
6) I am afraid of heights. In other words I am alto phobic 😛
7) I hate Chinese food, hate it , really really hate it. I dunno what people like about it 😛
28
Nov
07
Memoirs of a blogger
I asked myself, will I ever be able to recover? Or trust? Every person that I ever trusted stabbed me in the back. Am I so easy?
This year’s winter welcomed me with a bad flu 😛 . I am on self prescribed pills these days and thinking of visiting some doctor who might help me out of this misery. But can you trust a doctor with your health. After all he is the part of the same society we live in. I hate going to doctors but since I am doing everything that I hate doing; this exercise might not feel that bad.
This blog has become quite public. Visitors know me too well and expect better of me that I might fail to deliver. I am planning to abandon ronin and write under a different pen name in a totally different blog. That would be cool eh? In the olden age people use to seek solitude and some of them managed to get answers to their problems. Probably this might work for me as well. No I wont grow a beard and a pony tail 😛 to appear like late John Lennon.
Peace out!
17
Nov
07
Hang in there!
…When youre bearly getting by,
and you have a beastly day,
when life is hard to bear and it rubs you the wrong way …
Just turn your eyes to heaven
and pause to say a prayer
that God will lift you up
and help you HANG IN THERE!.
R O N I N 
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